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What Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig calls “the most exclusive postseason in professional sports” is not much more exclusive than the Auto Club, and it’s growing again. Only this time, that’s a good thing.

Expanded playoffs are generally a cheap gimmick, a way to wring more revenue out of John Q. Public and Arthur C. Nielsen that robs the regular season of its finality and reduces its import to that of a preliminary heat.

Yet while the overall trend is troubling — baseball’s postseason has grown at five times the rate of franchise expansion since 1968 — the addition of a ninth and 10th team to the tournament is basically benign.

It adds significance to division titles by placing an additional competitive burden on wild-card teams. It establishes a one-game win-or-else round for the two teams in each league that are able to reach the playoffs without finishing first. It likely will compel wild-card teams to burn their best pitcher before they face a rested top seed in the Division Series.

It restores balance to the force, as will the 2013 shift of the Houston Astros to the American League.

“By moving to 15-team leagues and, more importantly, (all) five-team divisions, players wanted to enhance the importance of winning the division,” said Michael Weiner, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association. “And this structure does that.”

If also-rans are allowed to compete for a championship — and the 2011 St. Louis Cardinals were the fifth wild-card team to win the World Series since 1997 — the hurdles ought to be high. While the wild-card New York Giants were required to play an extra game on their way to the Super Bowl, and to beat both Green Bay and San Francisco on the road, the baseball Cardinals played as many postseason games at Busch Stadium (nine) as they did away from home.

Some of this was a product of the awkward arrangement that ties World Series home-field advantage to the outcome of the All-Star Game. Some of it stemmed from the Cardinals being able to beat Milwaukee in the National Championship Series in six games. But all of it contributed to the perception the Redbirds had taken some shortcuts en route to their victory parade.

“I think this puts a premium on winning the division,” Padres manager Bud Black said Friday of the revised format. “Before, (being the wild card) was like you were one of the four teams. It didn’t matter. Now, if you’re the first wild-card team and you’ve got to take on that second wild-card team, that’s not a comfortable feeling.”

Since the new format would have made playoff teams of the 2007 and 2010 Padres, Black’s enthusiasm was to be expected. Since additional playoff berths effectively prolong public interest in cities where a division title is unattainable, that’s also a legitimate consideration.

The core business of professional sports is competition, but the primary purpose is profit. When Walter O’Malley owned the Dodgers, reporters sometimes wondered whether he would rather win the World Series in four games or lose in Game 7 and gain the additional gate receipts.